Connection with the masses—that is, with the vast majority of workers (and subsequently with all working people)—is the most important, the most fundamental condition for the success of any activity whatsoever by the trade unions. From bottom to very top of the trade union organization and its apparatus, there must be created and tested practically through experience over a long series of years an entire system of responsible comrades, necessarily including not only Communists, who must live in the thick of working-class life, know it thoroughly in all its aspects, be able to determine infallibly at any moment and on any question the mood of the masses, their actual needs, strivings, thoughts, be able to determine, without a shadow of false idealization, the degree of their consciousness and the force of influence of various prejudices and survivals of the old order, be able to win for themselves the unlimited trust of the masses through comradely relations with them, through attentive satisfaction of their needs. One of the greatest and most menacing dangers facing the numerically modest Communist Party, which, as the vanguard of the working class, leads a vast country undergoing (still without direct support from the more advanced countries) the transition to socialism, is the danger of becoming detached from the masses, the danger that the vanguard will race too far ahead, will not "level the line," will not maintain a firm connection with the entire army of labor—that is, with the vast

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